“[T]he sound-money principle has two aspects. It is affirmative in approving the market’s choice of a commonly used medium of exchange. It is negative in obstructing the government’s propensity to meddle with the currency system.”[1]

And further:

“It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments. Ideologically it belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of right.”[2]

Today’s national money regimes bear no resemblance to Mises’s sound-money principle. The quantity and quality of money is no longer a free-market phenomenon; it is determined by government-controlled central banks.